For a long time, I’ve been a Cassandra about schools and kids. I’ve written about declining interest in higher education, plummeting test scores, and the damage from closing schools during COVID. Since Cassandras are hated and ignored, I often tempered my conclusions and looked for some positive note to end my articles. But even the positive filter didn’t work. My concerns didn’t get much traction with the “serious people” for many reasons.

In journalism, the education beat is a training ground for kids from journalism school. Young journalists don’t have the experience to find the faults in the system or the clout to push their editors to run a negative story. Even if they did, they wouldn’t get the top headlines because the higher-ranking journalists and pundits focus on other topics, like the economy or elections.

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